“In what context might you be said to be friends?” asked Brrr.

“Yeah, what context would that be?” asked the dwarf drily.

“We’ve been circling around each other for years,” said Yackle. “Why don’t you take his deposition, Sir Brrr? He’s been on the outskirts of Elphaba’s life, too.”

“Pure coincidence, if it happened at all, which I’m not saying it did or it didn’t,” said the dwarf. “I had a different mission, lady. Don’t involve me in your hurly-burly.”

“You are involved,” said Yackle. “You wouldn’t have come here if you didn’t have business in the neighborhood. Don’t waste my time!”

“Why not? You’ve got plenty to waste,” he answered. “You may not be getting any younger, but you’re not getting any deader, either. No, I had reason to think I was looking for a Lion who might join us-but not this liverish lump. I must be off my game.”

“Your weird equipment knows where it wants to go, and when it wants to rest,” said Yackle. “So it wanted to come here, eh? It can look like a tiktok extravaganza, all gears and sequins and powdery flashes of light. Traveling theater. But what it knows, and what it shows! How do you account for that? Do you send your accomplices ahead of you as advance scouts, to sniff out the local gossip, to read the local tea leaves, so when you pull into the village you know what is on everyone’s mind?”

“Them? Hah,” said the dwarf. He plugged one nostril and mimed shooting a plug of mucus out of the other one. “Haven’t the brains among them to come in out of the rain.”

“Then it’s a charm-I’ve always guessed it. Some sledgehammer of a charm, that can read the world’s secrets correctly decade after decade.”

“Ninety-nine point ninety-seven percent accuracy,” said Ilianora. “That’s what the advertising panel says, anyway.”

“Hush, daughter,” said the dwarf, in a more kindly tone than before. “Pour me some water, will you?”

“Whose spell is as strong as that?” asked the Lion, becoming interested despite himself. “Whose spell could teach a puppet machine to spill secrets like that?”

“One whose name I don’t give out, as I don’t give out my own,” said the dwarf. “Ooh, this water is good. I’ve always wondered why the grand viziers of magic in the Emerald City-that is, if there are any-didn’t just get to work devising a spell to purify the whole of Kellswater. Reduce Loyal Oz’s dependence on foreign water. That lake is nearly as large as Restwater and if made potable could irrigate all of Loyal Oz. That would liberate the EC from its obsession with truculent Munchkinlanders, who, as I hear it told, never never shall be slaves.”

“One of the folktales I heard in my youth,” said Ilianora, “held that the ancient old demon-witch, Kumbricia herself, lives in the depths of Kellswater, or died there, perhaps, despoiling the supply for all time.”

“You and your tales,” said the dwarf. “One of the folktales I heard in my youth is that folktales are idiotic. Anyway, the cause is beside the point.”